The latest crowdsourced gem for the book crowd comes to us from Bibliobath. Thanks to Wing Weng and Jasper Jansen, a Dutch-Chinese couple based in Amsterdam, we finally have the waterproof book! They have 4 titles ready to go; a selection of short stories by Mark Twain, one of the selected poetry by W. B. Yeats, an edition of Shakespeare's Macbeth and a special Kickstarter-only edition of the Chinese classic The Art of War. The campaign just launched and the goal is to raise about $10,000 in the next month. Among the rewards are a couple geared...
A peak at some of the treasures of the Folger Shakespeare Library
Did you know that 82 of the 233 surviving First Folios of Shakespeare's plays live at The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.? To mark the quadricentennial of his death The Folger is sending a few copies on a tour of America. Jonathan Karl of ABC News was granted exclusive access to the Folger vault, where he got a look at some of the goodies that rarely see the light of day.
In the Stacks of the Folger Shakespeare Library
Frontispiece. The works of Mr. William Shakespear in six volumes, 1709 Back in August the Folger Shakespeare Library unsealed their almost 80,000 digital image archive! An absolute treasure-trove of material related to Shakespeare, the collection contains books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, art, and more for your online perusal. Through the Digital Image Collection, you can: Compare 19th-century productions of Shakespeare with today's through historic photographs and promptbooks Look at letters written by Queen Elizabeth I Examine rare paintings in "up close and personal" detail Read diary entries from over 200 years ago and much more I trust this won't be the last time...
Shakespeare Altered: Imagining other looks for the Bard
Everyone knows who he is and everyone has an image in their mind of what he looks like. Now let's open our mind and enjoy a sampling of what Shakespeare would look like if... The wonderful site Érase una vez compiles a selection of images featuring some of the "most picturesque, comic, absurd or ironic" images of the Bard. From Top Gun to the Terminator here is Willie in all his glory. More images here: Hey, William, is that you? (The other faces of Shakespeare)
Rapper’s Delight: A Strong Vocabulary
click here for hi-res version Matthew Daniels has created a pretty nifty flow chart with Pop Chart Lab ranking the size of the vocabulary of today's leading hip-hop artists. Daniel explains the project: Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever. I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake. 35,000 words covers...